I’ve spent time recently working on a tool to simplify genome
scaffolding. I presented a poster on this at this year’s American
Society for Microbiology conference (ASM 2011). I find poster sessions at large
conferences sometimes overwhelming. There are many posters and it can be hard to
find the most relevant.

Similarly, from the opposite side, being overlooked in a room with hundreds of
other posters is disheartening. I think creating and presenting a poster about
software is an even harder task. Software is an abstract concept so it’s
difficult to relay a narrative that poster viewers will connect with. Contrast
this with presenting research which benefits from a background, results,
discussion storyline and, possibly, eye-catching figures.

The poster I choose to create for ASM minimised the amount text on the page.
There is extensive documentation on Scaffolder so repeating this on the
poster felt redundant. I also believed that large amounts of text describing
the software would be forgotten. I designed the poster as a brief introduction
to the software. Anyone interested in learning more could follow the short URL
(http://next.gs) to the website containing more details.

The left-hand side of the poster describes the problem of creating a genome by
joining the contigs manually. The larger right-hand side illustrates the
scaffolder file format and how my software solves these problems. If anyone
expressed an interest in learning more I ran through a two-minute talk using
the poster as a prop. I could then answer any additional questions. I think
this worked well as I was able to have several conversations with people about
their own genome projects.

The poster was simple to produce and took about one week. I created the poster
in Inkscape and the design is composed mainly of simple shapes and text. When
I struggled to produce any part of my envisaged design a Google search found
plenty of Inkscape tutorials. Overall I felt that an information light, but
visually appealing, design was the good way to attract interest in the software
and then start a conversation.

Zen Faulkes has generously provided a critique of this posters. He raised
excellent points about the using larger fonts and tidying up the title by
removing the circle designs. I encourage reading this critique on his Better
Posters blog.